Philipp Missfelder, the 25-year-old chairman of the youth wing of Germany's Christian Union party. More:

Old people in Germany go too much to the doctor. They go there for entertainment or because they are lonely. Waiting rooms are full of old people using them as a social playground. The problem is no one has any idea how much that costs.

Missfelder is saying now what more and more of Europe and Japan's younger populations are going to be saying increasingly loudly in the coming decades. The young are going to be carrying the old with ever increasing taxes, and little promise themselves of ever getting any benefits. Eventually, an age war will occur: young against old. Who do you think will win? It will get very, very ugly. Remember the prophetic final line, uttered by Edward G. Robinson, in the movie "Soylent Green," the great dystopian film considered sci-fi when it came out. The final line? Listen to it yourself:"Soylent Green is made from people."

Before I went into anesthesiology, I was a family doctor for two years. My experience was precisely that described by Missfelder above. Old people who paid nothing for their medical care came routinely to see me for nothing. They were bored, scared, and lonely, and a trip to the doctor was the best thing in their week, what with the actual journey, visiting with other bored, scared, and lonely old people in the waiting room, and then the undivided attention of a young doctor who was being paid to listen to them. This is precisely what drove me into anesthesiology.